


Moments of Life Unremembered

by rivendellrose



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Coping, Gen, Post-Episode: s04e13 Journey's End
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-29
Updated: 2015-08-29
Packaged: 2018-04-17 19:03:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4677818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivendellrose/pseuds/rivendellrose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What does a moment mean if you don't remember it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Moments of Life Unremembered

“I’m sorry,” Martha says as she packs some of her clothes in an overnight bag along with toiletries and a few other essentials. “I’m sorry. But I can’t do this anymore.”

“Why? What’s going on?” Tom’s brows furrow like a worried puppy, and for a moment she feels like a complete bitch for doing this to him, for leaving him with no explanation he can understand, for leaving him with all his questions and not a single truth between them. “You disappear for weeks at a time, you come home looking like you’ve been through Hell and back... you have nightmares, but you won’t tell me about what. What _is_ it, Martha? What’s so terrible that you can’t share it with me?”

 _I saw you die_ , Martha thinks. _You saved my life, but you don’t remember it._

“I just... can’t.” She presses the palms of her hands flat to his chest, and feels the pulse of his one, fragile heart beating between them. “I can’t, Tom, and I’m sorry. I’m... Oh, god, I’m so sorry,” she continues, even though she hears the echo of another voice in those words, and it chills her to the bone to speak his words like this. “I... just... can’t. It’s not fair to you, it’s not fair to me... It’s just not going to work.”

He looks dazed. She’s seen that look before, in waiting rooms where the words ‘cancer’ and ‘stroke’ and ‘AIDS’ still echo between the fishtanks and the plastic potted plants. “Can... can I drive you someplace - do you need a ride, or...?”

She laughs - she can’t help it, because it’s exactly how they met the first time, the time he doesn’t remember. The time he never even lived. _Sure. Drive me to the end of the world. It’ll be easy, we’ve been there before._ “I’ll be fine,” she says. “I’ll send for the rest later. I’ve got a friend, he’s coming to get me.”

“He.” Tom stares at her, a thousand false stories and lurid nightmares reflected in his eyes. 

“It’s not like that,” Martha tells him, and kisses him on the cheek. “I really am sorry. You’re a good bloke, a _brilliant_ bloke, I just...” 

“You can’t,” he repeats bitterly. “Can you at least tell me _why_?”

“I’m...” _You’re not the man I love. He doesn’t exist, he never will. The Doctor and I, we saved the world, so you never became him._ “I just think... I can’t be in a relationship right now,” she finally says, falling back on the old standards. There’s a reason the classics are classic, she figures.

“Martha, please... just stay. We’ll push back the wedding, cancel it completely if you want to... we’ll take things slow... We’ll go on holiday. We’ll do whatever you want, just... don’t do this.” He catches her arm as she steps out of the bedroom, holding her still and ducking his head, trying to catch her lowered eyes. “Please, Martha.”

“I love you,” Martha tells the man who took a bullet for her on a darkened street he’s never seen. “Goodbye.”

* * *

“Aliens that look like pepper-pots! Bleeding pepper-pots, I am _not_ joshing you, I saw the pictures. Planets turning up out of nowhere, and then disappearing again! I saw better movies when I was _twelve_ , I’m telling you, Alice - all these morons in government, all these ‘experts’ on TV... Next thing, I’m telling you, we’ll have Martians! I’ll give you Martians, all right - I had this blind date last night... no, listen! Blind date, I show up at seven, and he just _strolls_ in at seven thirty like he’s the prince of Persia...”

In the next room, Sylvia stares blankly at the televsion and listens to her daughter on the phone. Her daughter who saved the world. Her daughter who traveled the universe. Her daughter, who remembers not a word of this, and cannot, or her neurons will collapse and her head will explode. At least that’s what _he_ told them, and since Dad seems to think he’s some kind of... Father Christmas and Buddha and Christ wrapped up into a skinny, suited package, well, he couldn’t possibly be lying, could he?

But he isn’t. Because if he was, why wouldn’t Donna remember?

_She was always going on about wanting to travel. Finally got her wish..._

“No, I’m _serious_ , Alice, he said that! Said it right out, like anybody in the world would understand. ‘Oh, sorry - I had a _castle raid._ ’ He’s a bleeding gamer! Obsessed with that... whatsit, you know, the one with the big computerized tits. Oh, come on, you remember, your idiot brother is obsessed with it... That’s the one, _yes!_ So I said to him, out of the chair, sunny-boy! I’m not taking up with some layabout’s going to get his arse stuck to his computer...”

“D’you suppose...” Wilf leaned forward, glancing back toward the kitchen to make sure Donna can’t hear him before he continues. “D’you suppose he might come back someday? Fix her, I mean, and take her back with him? He’s an alien, after all, they’ve got all kinds of technology, aliens have... I mean the good ones!” he added quickly, raising his hands to avert his daughter’s ire.

“I don’t think so,” Sylvia informs him in clipped tones. “He said that if she ever knew it would _kill_ her, Dad! Kill her! Wouldn’t you rather have her alive, than...” She trailed off quickly at a lull in Donna’s conversation, and lowered her voice. “She’s safe here, Dad, and she’s back with us, and she’s alive. That’s all that matters to me. That’s all that _should_ matter to you.”

And it’s true. Donna seems happy as she ever has been, if not quite as glowing and contented as she was with the Doctor. And she’s got an interview for a new job - permanent, no more of this temp stuff. It could really take her places, this job could, and she seems... optimistic about it, in her usual over-the-top sort of way. 

“Don’t you think, though... if you could have something like that...”

“Enough, Dad. She’ll hear you if you keep nattering on like that.”

In the kitchen, Donna talks on, and Sylvia tells herself firmly that’s all that matters. It doesn’t matter that the daughter she remembers from months past would have been bouncing out the door by now, or pointing up at the sky in ecstasies over her last absurd adventure with that Doctor of hers. It’s better this way. 

It has to be.

* * *

He’s not the man he used to be - or, rather, the man he never was. The man he was when he wasn’t... no, that’s not it at all. 

He is a shadow of himself. Literally.

Half Human, half Time Lord... he tells himself for a while that it doesn’t matter. He thought he was half-Human once, or at least said he was, after a regeneration gone bad with frozen synapses and a brain muddled in primative anesthesia. It was all a symptom of delusion and amnesia back then, though, and this time it’s _real_ and really very confusing. He has to remember that he can’t regenerate, that he can’t handle a strong electrical current, that he might drown or catch a cold or a flu or any number of other Human diseases. That he might die before his time and _not go on_ , not be reborn, not come back, just _end_. And it isn’t fair, because he’s not old enough (only a thousand or so, he’s lost track if he’s perfectly honest), and he ought to have another three lifetimes ahead of him. Instead, he’ll be lucky if he gets sixty more years out of this body, and then - pfft! Done. 

While the _other one_ goes on. Regenerates. Stealing his body, his life, his... everything. Except it can’t be stealing, because he was created out of the other one, but he’s the _Doctor_ , damn it. He knows he is. He remembers Gallifrey, and school, and the Master, and Susan and the pain of letting her go and all the friends after that he tried to fill that gap with, all the friends who made his life worthwhile. All the adventures. He remembers being that man, right up until he became _this_ man. This doomed, mortal, half-Human man whose heart ticks all by its lonesome, ticking like a bomb onward, onward, onward toward death.

He remembers being John Smith, and he remembers thinking, afterward, that it would be wonderful to live a normal life, a _Human_ life. 

It isn’t. Oh, no, it isn’t wonderful. It’s terrible.

He looked in the mirror the other day, just a few days after _he_ dropped them off here and ran for the skies, and he saw _death_ in that mirror. Death, and stagnation. He watched the lines crease his skin and wondered how old this body thinks it is, whether there are flaws in it just waiting to kill him, how long they’ll take to start showing themselves. What will it be, he wondered. Would it be his heart? What an irony that would be, if this one, stupid, fragile heart decided to give out on him. Or maybe it’s his liver, or his pancreas, or his lungs, oh, maybe his lungs are already against him, they do feel a bit strange, don’t they? Laboured, like they don’t want to take in all the air that he needs, and maybe it’s already beginning...

Rose says it’s probably just a cold, and smiles at him in that peculiar way that she has, now, like smiling at a stranger on a train who asks too personal a question when you’ve just met them. He smiles back. Yeah, that’s probably it, never had a cold before. It’ll be something different. Something fun. 

Something _fun_.

Something _fun_ , he’s saying that a _cold_ is something different and fun, now! If the body won’t kill him he thinks the unending daily sameness will, because he really is already chafing at the idea that he’s _never leaving this rock_. This beloved rock, this favorite of his of all the rocks in the universe, but he’s never leaving it. It’s a prison, now, and he hates that he feels that way. 

He’ll try. Really, he will. He’ll try to enjoy it, try to watch the sunsets and feel the rain and taste the chips with grease soaking through newspaper and warming his fingertips, making his mouth water with their rich, salty, fatty smell... Rassilon help him, they can fill his arteries, now, can’t they? All that fat will stick in the arteries, clog them up and stick under his skin, too, fat little adipose cells like fat little Adipose babies, and with his taste in food he’ll either starve or drown himself in it - probably both on alternating days. But he’ll _try._ He will. He’ll _try_ not to look at Rose’s laptop and the washing-machine and the car and the nifty little toys Pete brings over from Torchwood for him to identify, and he’ll _try_ not to think _Could I make a Tardis out of that? What about a sonic screwdriver? Could I turn_ that _into a vortex manipulator? How long would it take? How soon can I leave?_

He’ll _try_ not to run. He’ll _try_ not to start hearing drums in his head, drumming, thrumming, banging away like the other heartbeat that he lost, the one he never had, driving him, chasing him on and away...

It’s not her fault. He loves her, just like he always did, just like he always will. But he’s not himself anymore, not here, and it’s driving him mad, and driving _her_ mad, too. She said it straight out, told the other one that first day - she’s not in love with him, she’s in love with _him_. The other him, the original, the one who could take her to see strange new places and wonderful times, and who was an alien, something new, something different, something _special_. Not the killer. Not the replacement, the one who stepped in and committed genocide yet again while the other stood by, uncertain, and then cast judgement just like he’s always done. She’s in love with the one who has the Tardis, the one who has two hearts, the one whose hands are clean.

And with that kind of baggage between them, there’s no way it’s not going to drag them both down.

* * *

“What’s it like?” Gwen asked. They’d just dropped off the last of the civilians who’d been caught up in the latest alien invasion centered around Cardiff. Compared to some of the incidents in their past, this had been a relatively bloodless affair. Only three dead, two severely injured. The families of each of the dead had to be told polite, kind lies about a terrorist attack, about spouses or parents or children who died as heroes, protecting their fellow citizens. It would have been so much worse without her bravery, Jack had told an old man who was trying not to cry about his dead wife. Gwen had stood by his side and tried not to remember the woman’s ripped and broken body. 

After that, the injured ones had been comparatively comforting to handle. A few quiet words beside the hospital bed, a glass of water with a few colorless, odorless drops added in while Jack’s back was turned... They’ll wake up tomorrow and remember nothing of the past day, and the doctors will tell them about a terrible accident, and how lucky they were.

“What’s what like?” Jack asked, opening the door of the SUV.

“Not remembering a part of your life. You said you’d had that done to you. Two years of your life, you said... I can’t imagine it.” Knowing how close she’s been, a few times, to asking for those drops herself, she was horribly afraid that she might one day know, that she might one day want to be prepared.

“It’s like dreaming,” Jack told her. 

She laughed. “How is it like _dreaming_ , Jack? How can it possibly be like that?”

He sighed, and closed the door, and turned his whole attention on her in that way he had, the way of making her feel that she was the only person on Earth who mattered. The way that she tried not to ever think about outside of work. And he crossed his arms and leaned back against the SUV, watching her. “You know when you have a dream, but you wake up and you don’t remember it? You know you slept because time’s passed, the clock’s telling you that it has, and you’re pretty sure you must have dreamed because that’s what people _do_ when they’re asleep... but there’s nothing there, _nothing_. Not even a hint. You know that?”

Gwen, who had always hated thinking about dreams like that because she had the unnerving feeling that they were what death was like, except without ever waking up, nodded.

“It’s like that,” Jack told her. “Just a dream that you don’t remember. Except it wasn’t a dream. It was your life, just slipping through your hands, and you didn’t even notice it going.”


End file.
